Gabriel’s Home For Lost Boys

The worst part about leaving for Spokane, aside from the Spokane part, which Good God I don’t even like looking at the word Spokane, is that I’m ass-deep in a new obsession and the whole time I’m over there I’m going to be bouncing off the fucking walls.

I’d essentially resigned myself to sitting the office Warmachine fetish out, but when I thought about why I had done so, I couldn’t come up with anything concrete. I had to parse my assumptions for awhile before I realized that it came down to painting. I’ve seen unpainted armies on the board, had the temerity to field units thus once or twice, and more or less decided that if I couldn’t honor the table it wasn’t worth it.

I believe I mentioned that I had some Warmachine miniatures on my desk as decorations, but when things took off around here I suddenly found myself equipped to participate, and did so because why not. It’d be like having a sword and a shield over your mantelpiece, purely for looks, but then orcs ransack your neighborhood and you decide that you might as well manifest your latent warrior nature. It was the sort of night you have a handful of times in your life, where you kinda think, yeah. What I did tonight is what I want to do basically all the time.

And as much as it might terrify me, that means painting. Painting, as such, is something that Gabriel does. The key learning for me, then, is that there is painting, but there is also applying paint to things, and the second one is something anybody can do.

This realization occurred at a fortuitous juncture. A friend of mine had reached some threshold in his self-conception where he could accept that boardgaming had eclipsed his love for wargaming, or at any rate, it had eclipsed his desire to continually paint his own armies and then paint his friends’ armies, forever surrounded by raw, grey plastic, a crown of warped sprues his only reward. So I said, why yes, I will take stewardship over your paints and your instructionalDVDs and to a certain extent your pulverized wargaming dreams.

I wasn’t aware this was something I wanted to do at all, but the urge to complete this squad is cinched around my neck. It’s absolutely a kind of Zen practice, applying pigment, and it’s beyond strange to me that the part which kept me on the periphery of this hobby for so long has reliably delivered so much enjoyment. I spend two, three hours a night painting these fucking things. And when I finish this post, I’ll be doing it again. I think I’ve almost perfected the leather on their little bags (!!!!).